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Simple RSS feed tracking: Open Source Feedburner #5727

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anonymous-matomo-user opened this issue Jul 19, 2008 · 7 comments
Open

Simple RSS feed tracking: Open Source Feedburner #5727

anonymous-matomo-user opened this issue Jul 19, 2008 · 7 comments
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Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc.

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@anonymous-matomo-user
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Piwik could integrate an “open source feedburner” that would be a proxy between the original feed URL and the visitor. This proxy could then track data about visitors, what articles are clicked on, etc.

Building such a set of features is not easy, as the code has to deal with lots of edge cases in feed parsing (lots of rss/atom feeds are missing fields, incorrectly formatted, etc.).

We could
- At first provide only the number of subscribers, by parsing the http fields which contain the count of subscribers for each caller
- Later in V2, enhance the code to also parse the feeds and track clicks on links.
Keywords: rss feedburner tracking "open source feedburner outofscope

@mattab
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mattab commented Oct 24, 2012

News: since feedburner is dead, Piwik could step up as the Open Source Feedburner!

We could get inspiration from this code: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-feed-statistics/screenshots/

@anonymous-matomo-user anonymous-matomo-user added this to the Future releases milestone Jul 8, 2014
@mattab mattab added this to the Long term milestone Aug 3, 2014
@mattab
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mattab commented Oct 2, 2014

Feed Analytics

  • Measure which links are most clicked in the feed content
    • tag links with campaign parameters:
      • add params to article title link,
      • add params to article content URLs
        • only edit URLs that point to known aliases URLs and/or the URL of the hostname generating the feed
        • (do not modify other URLs to keep links clean in feed content)
  • Measure how many times articles are viewed by a human in a feed reader
    • append to the feed article content text an image tracker tag to track in Piwik when an article is read in feed reader
    • Let user disable this post view tracking feature
  • Measure how many people are subscribed to the Feed
  • How to add RSS feed tracking
    • we need to build server side code that will parse a Feed and add all necessary information.
    • this code / library will need to be used on the server side when generating the RSS feed
      • to edit article URL and add campaign parameters,
      • to add an image beacon in each article to count number of views for each post,
      • to edit links in the feed content and add campaign tracking parameters
      • send a tracking request each time the feed is viewed
    • we could ask WP-Piwik to improve the Wordpress plugin and automatically add piwik tracking code to Wordpress feeds
    • similarly other CMS plugins could be improved to add feed tracking capabilities

@mattab mattab modified the milestones: Long term, Mid term Dec 23, 2015
@mattab mattab added duplicate For issues that already existed in our issue tracker and were reported previously. and removed Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical. labels Dec 5, 2016
@mattab mattab modified the milestones: Long term, Mid term Dec 5, 2016
@mattab mattab removed the duplicate For issues that already existed in our issue tracker and were reported previously. label Dec 5, 2016
@LiberMortis
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Someone could reverse engineer the extended feed script for Wordpress - https://github.com/WPPlugins/wordpress-feed-statistics
and integrate that into the code. I'd do it, but I just don't have the time... :|

@hermann77
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Any ideas or changes in this issue?
Maybe we can start small: just read 'subscribers'/'reader' value for a predefined RSS-Feed from User-Agent of the http-requests and save it as 'Custom Variable' in Matomo?

By the way: do we have a possibility to read the complete 'User Agent' like the web-server do? Or does Matomo only get predefined parts (like OS, Browser etc.)?

@sgiehl
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sgiehl commented Jun 13, 2022

@hermann77 Matomo uses https://github.com/matomo-org/device-detector to parse the useragent. But the useragent isn't stored in the database.

@moritzmetz
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This ticket is more than 10 years old now. Does anyone know of proceedings concerning tracking downloads of podcasts?

@sgiehl
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sgiehl commented May 9, 2023

@moritzmetz As downloads from podcasts are requested directly from the webserver, the simplest way to "track" those in Matomo is using log importing. See https://matomo.org/guide/tracking-data/import-server-logs/

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